


What to fill the lacuna of your absence but absence itself?

by Lsusanna



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Baby Fëanor, Canonical Character Death, Done Badly, F/M, Grief/Mourning, How To Antagonize Your Dad Into Uncomfortable Confessions In Ten Steps Or Less, Loss of Parent(s), POV Second Person, POV feanor, Parent-Child Relationship, Valinor, cannibalism but like in a world-buildy thematic way no actual people eating, goes by the shibboleth canon, it's the miriel's funeral fic, well tween feanor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 09:21:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10659624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lsusanna/pseuds/Lsusanna
Summary: The Eldar were doomed to love the world, never leaving it, and so your people honor the dead. They live on through the living, and so forth into metaphor, the closest family taking the heart raw, even though now you’re wiser and stronger and glow in the dark, and ‘soul,’ scientifically, is replaced by ‘spirit,’ which you know exists quite separately from bloody muscle. But the custom remains—to honor the dead, however rare the dead are. There are worse correlations, to be sure; Míriel Þerindë is honorable, and inimitable, and dead.





	What to fill the lacuna of your absence but absence itself?

**Author's Note:**

> this came from the meta that went around tumblr, about how elves never leaving the world meant 'cannibalistic funerary customs':  
> http://tyelpings.tumblr.com/post/155330777680/so-there-was-a-post-going-around-about-how-elves
> 
> and the resulting fic by thelioninmybed:  
> http://thelioninmybed.tumblr.com/post/155580989932/i-promised-crocordile-id-write-more-amlach-and
> 
> I might suggest reading at least the meta before this fic, for context. As mentioned in the tags I went by the canon presented in The Shibboleth of Feanor, where he's older when Miriel dies.

"Have you ever actually _noticed_ the skill of a person passing into the consumer?” you say. Loudly. And without proper preamble, so your father falters with the fastenings at his collar and doesn’t, immediately, answer. 

“No,” he says, carefully. “The strength of the departed returned to the community, only insofar as they provided sustenance.” You suppose that meant more when the Quendi starved regularly. For such uncharitable sentiments you were run out of the specially constructed out-of-doors kitchens by the cook, also a mortician in Cuiviénen, who claimed to be busy as decorously as a nine-fingered woman with deltoids that size could—but no biologist by and means, whatever her other qualifications, so you don’t know why you bothered.

That occupied all of an hour of your morning, and your father has been indulgent in answering your questions since, whenever you come at odd intervals to his rooms, unannounced. You know he knows you don’t like to do things without knowing how to first.  If you’re worried about anything, though, it’s that you’ll start laughing during the obsequy, which you were doing into a towel inside your wardrobe for perhaps an hour before you came to lean against your father’s desk. The erasure is absurd—tangibly alive to consumed, bones and other unpalatables burned to ashes and scattered.

You screw your face into a scowl to keep from smiling at the thought, and flap at the corner of the rug with your toes—he’s replaced it, it used to be your mother’s work, and the room like everywhere else in the palace used to smell of her favorite deep-throated lilies. “This from the one who yelled at me for eating dirt.”

“That is entirely different.”

“In. Organisms?” You’re pinching the bridge of your nose; you stop when you realize you’re taking to fruition the motion he aborted a few minutes before.

“In respect. The function of the practice is to honor the dead,” he says. You’re being reprimanded, specifically, for irreverence, you know. Which you find very funny, somewhere tangled in your ribs if not enough to force a smile. “It signifies that we do not leave the world, and that the deceased never truly leave the living.”

“But she did, explicitly—it’s a metaphor then?”

“Yes.”

“How did you start doing this if you learned of the Halls from the Valar?”

“We were perspicacious of some things before we properly learned them,” answers your father.

“That’s not—fine.” You watch him reorder his braids more formally. You don’t know why he never removes his crown to do it, he just works around, as if that’s easier. “No one ever got a disease from this? Because you did it when we still contracted diseases.”

“No, no one did.”

“Well, that’s not feasible. Unless you’re supposing it isn’t just metaphor, which begs the question what you’re actually ingesting if the essence of the person is gone to Mandos.”

“We don’t know.”

You hum. “If it was improper the Valar would have told us so, of course.  But still we don’t have answers because no one’s died since we got access to all this knowledge—no one else is likely to—well if remarriage rates rise—really we’re wasting a prime opportunity to make a study of this—”

“Fëanáro, don’t be manic. It’s ill-becoming,” says your father, flatly.

You suppose that’s true, as you’ve never seen a king or prince of Three Kindreds so disjointed in a public audience. And you could be, you’ve been fasting since yesterday, you’re not exactly sure-footed. But how can you tell, you think, fingers drumming against the table, when this has been the way for weeks? “I suppose _she_ is—what did you call it—‘partaking’?”

“Indis and Míriel were great friends,” your father says—you think ‘tiredly’ is a good descriptor, he hasn’t slept, but also hasn’t seemed to want to, or need to, so you don’t know.

“You keep saying that.” He crosses the room for his shoes and lifts your hand off table, and you notice the hand about your throat was the _noise_ your own fingers had been drilling into the wood. A parting gift from Ingwë, mahogany; you stare at it. “Incidentally she never has.”

“Perhaps she thinks you’ll eat her alive,” your father suggests, reproving.

“Well, no,” you say, looking up, considering the concept as you go. “She’d have to die first to fit the custom.” Which is a bit much, you know as soon as you say it and before the quelling stare a deliberate few seconds in coming.

“Today,” he says, straightening, “is for honoring the dead. For honoring your mother. And you are not yet ready.”

It’s as much a dismissal as sending his manservant from the room was, in addition to being true, as you are dressed for neither funeral nor feast and you and your father are supposed to begin the proceedings come Laurelin’s waning, and the sky out the window is already silver-red. But you’ve yelled at him at least a baker’s dozen times since he returned from Valmar and he’s been no less calm than he is today, which is not transactional and is annoying and also a lie and if you wanted to be offered yet another out you would have stopped returning here for conversations wound in progressively tighter circles after you asked him what he did about his parents and his sister, if he never found their bodies.

“‘Honor the dead.’ Not that it’s also convenient— “

“Curufinwë, you may continue your litany tomorrow, but not today.”

“ _Today_ is hypocrisy—“

“Fëanáro she didn’t _want_ to come back!” your father says in a rush, with a gesticulation he stops short of putting his whole body into.

“You don’t know!” you shout and you sound—very petulant, and younger than you are.

“She said so—”

“That doesn’t count!”

“If she wasn’t of sound mind Manwë—”

“That’s the part I _meant_ , she was forced to!”

“It’s been years!” says your father earnestly.  “She had years before the asking. Fëanáro I’m sorry, truly, but she didn’t want to.”

“‘Been years’—where are we going? We don’t die anymore, we don’t do anything but make up better ways of dissecting time, we had nothing to do but wait!”

He makes a blunt noise. “Náro I don’t know what more you.” He redirects, midsentence, restoring posture and mien. “She didn’t want—”

“ _You_ didn’t want!”

Your father looks thunderous, and much taller. “ _I did not force this_.”

“No but you wouldn’t have wanted her to come back, you wouldn’t!” You can’t remember how hard you were actually trying not to be frenetic but you’ve failed. “Say it, you were finished waiting for her before _Manwë_ asked her anything, you were finished when you came back from that stupid forest!”

“You left before I did, a year or more before!”

“But _you_ said you wouldn’t leave until she came back, that’s what you said, you said that you would stay there and then you didn’t!”

“ _And_? I did everything, Fëanáro, I don’t know what you want from me!”

“I want you to stay that you wouldn’t have wanted her to come back, just admit it, just say it—”

“No then, no I wouldn’t have!” Your father doesn’t often yell but when he does he roars, the voice that carries to the backs of crowded city squares peerless in close combat.

“But she didn’t do anything!” you scream. You don’t have his presence but if you claw to the tops of your lungs you match the volume.

“She left! She left you, she left—me, and I wasn’t going to keep making a fool of myself kneeling in the dirt talking to someone who wasn’t there!”

“She was sick! It wasn’t her fault!”

“Well it was something’s fault!”

“ _It wasn’t mine!_ ”   

He looks staggered. “I—of course not. That isn’t what I meant.”

“Ah, well, it’s feasible, isn’t it?” It doesn’t come out as cutting and blasé as you mean it to, because now that the pressure’s bled out of the room like air from a vacuum and neither of you are yelling you’ve gone severely hoarse. “Causality; a surplus in one thing is a dearth in another—”

“No it is not, that is not what I meant—”

“Should make sure, though, because—” You cut yourself off, tongue running into teeth. Of all the things you _expected_ him to do you didn’t _expect_ him to hug you, even though you know that’s what _he_ does, in lieu of bellicose questions. You leave your arms where they are in space, at odd angles.

“No,” he says. “ _Fëanáro_. I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. I’ve never meant that—it isn’t _true_ , firstly.” The top of your head muffles his voice; you suppose he must look stupid, bent nearly double. You suppose you’ll just wait for him to let you go, your arms hanging at your sides. “You don’t really think it?”

“No I’m hysterical.”

He winces; he’ll likely apologize for that too at some point. “ _Fëanáro_ —”

“No, I really don’t,” you say into his sternum, so that in his grave disquiet, he won’t feel the need to turn your face up to look at him.

“Your mother…” he begins, inchoate, petting your hair. “None of this is _your_ fault.”

“Mmhm,” you reply. You’re cognizant of that; ‘fault’ would be the wrong term anyway. Eminence for erasure and only one for each of you, your mother and yourself, so you took hers and gave her yours and are left, now, with pyre of a spirit, that is yours but was given you.   

You suppose you were waiting for your father to let you go but he has, and you’ve still not moved. Curious, you think, but not as curious as it would be if you had eaten in recent memory and were his robes not Telerin silk and were he not taller and also warm—

“Fëanáro, breathe. Air. With your nose.”

You sniff wetly.

“Good, thank you,” your father says. Quietly, so the air is heavy around the words, if not around you, still boneless against his chest and your head still under his chin. He exhales, like decompression. “We do need to go,” says he. “You need to dress. We can—later, but. Alright?”

“Yes.” It _would_ be rather indecorous, to be late, to leave your mother kept warm over a low flame. Whenever you’ve noted it done in the past it always dried the meat.

Your father doesn’t pry your knotted fingers out of his belt, only—rearranges you, so that neither of you need walk backwards. There’s a stain on his front that is either tears or snot, that you left and should likely feel sorry for. He takes you back to your rooms and waits as you dress, as you adorn yourself in your most formal clothes, your most well-wrought jewels. Finery you wouldn’t even bother with in presence of Olwë or Ingwë, not for any solstice or wedding, for any obeisance save one to the Valar, maybe.

You go out with your father among the poplars and willows in the hour Tirion is most suited, Laurelin’s whites and golds and bloody reds best composed over Yavanna’s roiling fields; Taniquetil, studded with foothills. Come her waning Aman is changed from a world on fire to Telperion’s silvers, white in the light and blue in the shadows, so that the grass is more like water and the marble walls like ice. Varda’s yawning emptiness hangs over the bone-white city in the bone-white mountains like a tapestry, Varda’s stars overhead like eyes.

You go with your father to honor your mother. To honor the dead, however rare the dead are in the deathless land, among your deathless people. There are worse correlations, to be sure; Míriel Þerindë _is_ honorable, and inimitable, and dead.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, and concrit is welcome! I'm erotetica on tumblr if you want to say hi.


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